Articles, Blog Posts, Books and Quotes on Agile Project Management
Gunther Verheyen presents the the majors aspects of the distinct views of Lean and Agile, indicating the similarities. He elaborates on his statement that the houses of Lean and Scrum are similar houses, just built with different materials. His conclusion is that the open framework of Scrum aligns and blends the underlying thinking of Agile and Lean.
In this blog post, Pawel Brodzinski discusses the problem of the Product Role in Scrum teams. It is not always possible of having a client representative working closely with a project team. So the team should sometimes find other ways to get answer questions about the product and fill the product ownership activity. His conclusion is that knowing what is important to build is the essence of product ownership. A good Product Owner is only one way to achieve this objective.
In this blog post, Matt Archer shares his definition of the Agile Test Lead role and what he thinks they should contribute to Scrum teams. He says that behind the practical aspects of the Agile Test Lead role, there are also subtle connotations of coaching in this position. In his opinion, it is this coaching element that makes many Agile Test Leads valuable for the Scrum team they belong to.
Thom Roach shares with us in this blog post the metrics that he includes in iteration summary reports. The three main statistics he uses are Iteration Statistics summary, Iteration Cumulative Flow and Team Velocity Chart.
Epics are used to get a bigger picture of user stories, but we need another level of abstraction. We need to bring together the various Epics that describe how our solution will evolve to its final endpoint, and how different functional teams and specialists will interact.
Mike Cohn wrote an interesting post where he discusses he allows or even encourages to estimate with story points as large as 20, 40, and 100. He explains that they are useful when you need first and not necessarily precise estimate of the general size of a new project being considered.
Even if the the Agile Manifesto declares that you should value “individuals and interactions over processes and tools”, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use any tool. The authors of this article shares their experience using agile tools and explains why they prefer non-software tools and why you should be carefully pick the tools that will support your practice and your company if you pick any at all.